Falling Free - a Star Citizen story
by OmgImPwned
Summary: Jobless, destitute and with major bills in the mail, the dishonorably discharged ex-Lieutenant Commander Tara Watanabe finds herself thrown in the deep end with no lifeline. This is the end, it seems, and there is no way out… until she gets an unexpected offer. An offer she can't afford to refuse. But everything isn't what it looks like, and betrayal lurks around every corner.
1. No Such Thing As Rock Bottom

**Author's note:** Hello everyone!

This is a fanfic story set in the universe of the game Star Citizen, and written under my Star Citizen name, _Nekxyu_. I posted it on the official SC forums a while ago, but things happened in RL and I forgot about it. Just recently it got shared as a part of the official developer post Fan Spotlight: Fan Fiction Volume 2, even though it was technically abandoned. This rather flattering event prompted me to revisit the story and commit more thoroughly to continuing and finishing it in a somewhat timely manner. As part of that effort, I'm posting it here, where people can more easily subscribe to updates and the reading format is more pleasant.

Progress on the new chapters can be followed on **_twitter dot com slash nekxyu_**, should you so wish. Readers of my in-progress Naruto fanfic _In Fire Forged_ who should happen by here, have no worries; this story is second in priority and will only see progress as long as _In Fire Forged_ is on schedule.

On another note, the following two chapters were written quite a while ago and without extensive beta review, and have not yet seen editing with everything I've since learned in mind. Rest assured that a lot of it will be fixed with future updates.

* * *

This story is rated **M** for language, graphic violence and mild sexual themes.

Readers should be cautioned that the story may turn fairly dark further in and does not pull its punches. Listing the trigger warnings that don't apply might be easier than listing the ones that do.

That being said, enjoy reading!

* * *

**Chapter One - No Such Thing As Rock Bottom**

* * *

**UEEN Tribunal Logs**

_Case #83629_

_Verdict in court-martial of Lieutenant Commander Tara Watanabe, temporary Commanding Officer, Squadron 211, Wing 7_

_Kilian System_

_MacArthur Orbital Navy HQ_

_Courtroom Three_

_21st December, 2942_

_Transcript beginning 9:11 AM, ending 9:18 AM_

"The prisoner will face the court.

"Lieutenant Commander Watanabe, you have been tried by court-martial on the specifications named against you. Are you prepared to hear its verdict?"

"I am."

"On the first specification of the charges, that on the 23rd of November you did order your wing in pursuit of Ivan Dascombe's ship into the planetary atmosphere of Keene and into the ambush that followed, and in so doing consciously disobeyed orders to the contrary, this court, by unanimous vote, finds you guilty as charged.

"On the second specification of the charges, that your actions did expose other units in your wing to severe damage and casualties, this court, by unanimous vote, finds you guilty as charged.

"On the third specification of the charges, that you did open fire on Ivan Dascombe's ship in a crowded metropolitan area without due cause, this court, by vote of four to two, finds you not guilty.

"On the fourth specification of the charges, that you did attempt to murder Ivan Dascombe in cold blood and had to be forcibly restrained from doing so by your wing-mates, this court, by vote of four to two, finds you not guilty.

"In considering which penalty attaches to the crimes of which you stand convicted, this court has taken into account the testimonies in your favor of Admiral Zhao Hayfield, Lieutenant Lars Karkaroff, Lieutenant Charles DeLaney, Lieutenant Junior Grade Alice Jensen and Chief Petty Officer Bellatrix Polotskij.

"It is therefore the opinion of this court, by a vote of four to two, that the deaths one day prior of your Wing CO, Captain Bruce Montgomery, and his second-in-command Commander Alexei Gregorovitch, constitute extenuating circumstances.

"In view of this, it is the ruling of this court, by a vote of four to two, that the accused, Lieutenant Commander Tara Watanabe, shall be stripped of her Navy pension and savings, as well as all rank, rights, privileges and prerogatives as Lieutenant Commander in the UEEN save her Citizenship, and dishonorably dismissed as unfit for duty in our Navy, judgment to be executed within one day of this hour.

"This court stands adjourned."

* * *

Tara Watanabe stared mutely out of the window of the public hover shuttle as it lifted off from the spaceport at New Austin and settled into the appropriate west-bound traffic plane. No money to spare for a personal cab. Not now.

At least, she reflected sourly, they had let her keep her Citizenship.

_Fat lot of good that will do me now._

Beneath the shuttle, the industry and bustle of Terra's third largest city stretched out as far as the eye reached. Huge, yes, but not compared to Prime or Quasi. The sight was exactly as she remembered.

The short trip by public shuttle afforded her far too little time in which to prepare herself.

She got off close to her mother's home. Not the old one she recalled from her childhood, but the new one they'd moved to later, after the accident.

She'd lugged her duffel bag up on her shoulder - containing a few sets of clothes and assorted memorabilia; all she had to show for almost ten years of naval service - when someone came running up from behind her.

"Damn, Tara!" her brother Kevin called and came to a halt. "Almost didn't recognize you, with that hair."

Tara reached up and touched her short-cropped black hair. She shrugged, a little defensively. "It's more practical that way."

Kevin grinned smartly. "Always the practical person, you. It looks good, though. You look good."

You'd have to look long and far for a lie more blatant than that, but Tara was too tired to call him on it. She studied her little brother closer. He was a few days unshaven, his blond hair was frazzled and unkempt, his green-blue eyes were slightly red and he smelled of alcohol.

_So no changes there, I see. Wonderful. Been drinking away the spare change again, Kev? Or was it the stims? Or the Neon?_

She sighed wearily and glanced about them. "What are you doing here, Kevin?"

"Receiving my elder sister, of course!" Kevin looked nervous; unsure whether he should give her a handshake or try to hug her. She resolved his dilemma by shoving her duffel bag at him.

"Come on." She strode off.

He followed after. "Bad day?"

"Try month," she grumbled.

He winced. "Yeah, I can see why that would be."

She raised an eyebrow at him, dryly. "Can you now."

"Well, I didn't hear much," Kevin admitted, "but it sounds like you got fired or something."

Tara snorted. "You don't get fired from the Navy. I was discharged." _Dishonorably._

"So what's the difference?"

_Not one _you'd_ care about._

"It's about the same, I guess," she sighed. Then she glanced curiously at him. "How'd you even know I would be here?"

Kevin shrugged lightly. "Kid told me. She heard from mom, I guess. She's back in the wheelie. This new nerve treatment thing they're trying is being hard on her, not that she'd let it show. You know how the crippled old woman is."

"Yeah," Tara acknowledged. "I know."

"But yeah," Kevin continued, "I thought I'd pop down and do the welcome thing since mom's not doing so well right now."

"_So_ thoughtful of you to catch me alone…" Tara muttered under her breath, unable to help herself. She wondered when it was coming.

"What's that?" Kevin asked, not having quite caught her mutter.

"Oh, nothing," she said. "How's the little ginger explosion?" Her niece Alexis would be what, _nine_, now? Gods, but time really did fly.

"Good," he said, smiling. "She's doing good in her Equivalency classes." He shook his head. "Smart little bugger, brain like a sponge. I even got her in a decent small-sized class, only about sixty in it. The teacher is supposed to be pretty good. All the right certs and such."

"And her mother?"

His smile froze. "We're… still not talking. I think the bitch lives down by Quasi somewhere. Found a fellow fundamentalist to coop up with, spawning fresh, brainwashed little baby minions by the dozen."

"I see." Tara was not surprised. That had been a doomed pairing from the beginning, a real recipe for disaster. She'd told him so. But hey, the girl had been _pretty_. Couldn't blame him for _that_.

_Men._ She almost snorted. Almost.

And not using contraceptives… she had yelled at Kevin for that, she recalled, after she found out. But it had been too late by then. Kevin had only found out about the pregnancy _after_ he got out of jail, and the lucky mom had been one of those silly anti-abortion purists so she hadn't done anything about it either. The following court case… had _not_ been pretty. Or cheap.

It was amazing that Alexis was turning out so well in the end. Tara freely admitted to doting shamelessly on her favorite and only niece. Never having had kids herself…

_You know_, she thought. _Thirty-one is not even _close_ to too late for that._

_Then why do I feel so old…?_

She shivered and shook her head to clear that thought firmly. Yeah. Because she didn't already have enough problems as it was. They entered a small pedestrian concourse built into the side of a huge, circular apartment building. Mother's was on the far side of the building; about a five minute walk.

It looked fancy on the outside. On the inside, not so much. Windows lined the side of the street, offering a fairly decent view out over the sunny outskirts of New Austin. It was all very suburban.

Kevin swallowed. "Say, Tara," he began.

_Oh, great, here we go. Bring it on._

"Yeah?" she asked.

"You're not making fat stacks any more, are you?"

_Bullseye._

"Nope," she confirmed sourly.

"That's not good…" he muttered to himself, rather redundantly. "Not good at all."

"Nope," she confirmed again. "So there's just the civilian savings account I set up. We'll have a few months until that goes dry to do something for mom."

Her brother chuckled in a very brittle, nervous way. "Err, yeah, hey, big sis… about that…"

She stopped walking in the middle of the concourse and felt suddenly very cold, despite the heat. She narrowed her eyes at him. He _never_ called her that unless something was extremely wrong and she had to fix it for him.

"No…" she began. _You didn't. Not on top of all this._

"I… kinda blew that account wide open a ways back," he admitted. "I had a debt with these people, you know, the kind you don't wanna mess with…" he trailed off.

Tara blinked. "How did you even get _into_ that account?"

"Uh…" he hesitated, looking down at his feet and fidgeting visibly. "Mom, eh… well. I asked… her."

Tara couldn't stop the glare of disgust she sent his way. "Kevin, you idiot." _Mother, you idiot._

He shrunk visibly under her gaze. "But sis… I had no cho—" He stopped when he saw her expression.

She held up her hand. "No. I… I don't want to hear about it." She breathed in. Out. In. Out. Okay, calm, good. No panic. "Just tell me how much is left."

He shrunk even further.

"Kevin…" she growled warningly.

"Nothing," he admitted weakly. "It's all gone. And I, err… still owe them. A bit. Sort of."

Tara leaned against the nearby wall, closed her eyes and rubbed her face tiredly. She felt dizzy, and a little sick. This just got better and better.

"Sis…?" Kevin ventured cautiously after a small while.

She pinched her nose and demanded, "What?!"

"Well, what are we gonna do to pay for mom's treatment, man?" he asked.

She opened her eyes and snarled at him. "How the fuck am I supposed to know? What do you expect me to do, huh, when you always just go ahead and screw things up anyway?"

His lip twitched, betraying anger for the first time. "That's not fair."

"Life's not fair," she snapped. "Deal with it."

This outburst made him subside, for a while. Meanwhile, Tara thought furiously, and came up empty. Their credit was non-existent; they could take no loans that were big enough. Their cash-flow was equally non-existent.

She had no ship, so she couldn't fly freelance and try to earn cash that way, and no company was going to hire her for security or running cargo with a dishonorable discharge hanging over her head, Citizenship or no. At least not without very good recommendations or contacts, where she, again, came up short.

"You're always the one with the solutions," he insisted quietly. "You'll figure it out. You always do."

"I know…" she muttered quietly. "I know."

She pushed tiredly off of the wall and picked up her duffel bag where Kevin had dropped it. She set her jaw firmly and found herself clenching her fist.

"Don't worry, Kev," she said quietly, not looking at him. "I'll figure something out."

_Somehow._

The day seemed a lot less sunny now.

* * *

Kevin abandoned her just outside mom's apartment, pleading that he had to go pick up Alexis from a sleepover at a friend's place. He refused to let his daughter travel the city alone.

"Oh, don't worry, Tara darling," her mom said immediately after Tara had carefully hugged the frail woman in her wheelchair and admitted the situation. "I'm sure you'll figure it all out."

_Thank you, mom, for the unbiased vote of confidence_, Tara thought bitterly.

The problem with mother was that she was always too pleased to even have her children around to ever think about herself or blame anyone for anything. Tara had always thought the scatter-brained woman was far too easy-going on everyone around her.

"You were always such a smart, stubborn girl," her mother went on, gushing. "Just like Alexis! You get it from Aral, you know. My looks, his brains, I always said." She shook her head in fond reminiscence of her deceased husband.

Where-as her little brother had probably gotten the reverse end of that deal, Tara thought dryly.

"You're _blond_, mom," she pointed out wearily, like she always did when this point came out. It was one of their traditional greeting rituals. "And short. And your eyes are green, not brown."

"Well, yes, yes," her mother in turn waved this point away with her functional arm, as she always did. "But the beauty up there is all mine." She sounded as if she was quite proud of this personal achievement.

"And how is the writing going?" Tara asked, seeking some diversion.

"The writing is going fine, dear," her mother pointed out edgily. "It's the selling part that's not going well." She shook her head sorely. "People these days; no taste, I tell you."

Mother had been a fashion model and moderately famous actress, before the hover car accident which had robbed her of most of her motor abilities and killed father. Now she was a budding romance writer. Or so she had insisted for the past ten years. Tara had yet to see any particular talent in the field emerge. Evidently, the audience agreed with her.

Tara sighed. "Whatever you say, mom."

* * *

Kevin made it home with Alexis an hour after that. By then, Tara was already hiding on the cramped balcony with a cup of tea, checking job listings on the net and making calls. She'd gotten two hasty rejections, and a number of half-promises and we'll-think-about-its that she knew better than to expect to come through. She supposed that set the trend. No company that paid well enough for her needs would take her. No surprises there.

Alexis was thrilled to see her aunt home from the Navy, and started peppering her worshipfully with questions about everything military. Tara, with feigned reluctance, put aside her evidently futile job-search for the night and devoted herself to playing along with the kid.

Kevin cooked a mean pasta carbonara. Mom gushed alongside Alexis, caught up by her granddaughter's infectious enthusiasm. Like pea and pot, those two, except Alexis sounded smarter. Tara tolerated the onslaught with forced good humor.

When she crashed on the couch that evening (the guest bed was broken), she almost felt mellow. Almost. Perhaps it was the three - no, four? - glasses of cheap wine she'd managed to drink. Bad habit to get into, that. If tempting. But she wasn't Kevin. Or dad.

_No drinking._

But the dark quiet of the apartment offered time to brood. It was early in the morning when she finally slept.

* * *

The following days, Tara met only with further failure. The public parts of her naval record were proving to be highly condemnatory. Forget all about the _ten years_ of loyal service. Forget all about the multiple commendations. Forget all about the medals, for exceptional competence and for being wounded in the line of duty. Forget all about the early promotions.

All they saw was the end of it. That disaster and the court-martial that followed. Unfit for command. Unfit for duty. Dishonorably discharged. Enough to make any responsible exec flee in terror.

One evening, a week later, Kevin found her cooped up on the balcony, spreadsheets and graphs and price listings laid out before her, her face scrounged up in thought.

"Woah," he said. "What's all that?"

"An exercise in futility," she admitted wearily. "I'm not cut out for finance. Unless the orange juice market actually does boom in two months, in which case, shoot me."

"Okay," he agreed blithely. "I'll see if I remember." He eyed her over. "You look tired. Are you sleeping enough?"

She looked briefly away. _I don't want to sleep. Not with dreams like that._

"I sleep fine," she said in a brittle tone of voice, pretending to look over the mess she'd made on the table. She gave up, leaned back in her chair and rubbed her eyes, before glancing up and shooting Kevin a morose glance. He was fidgeting nervously. Kevin almost always fidgeted nervously, of course, but today was different. His fidgeting had purpose. She could tell.

She sighed. "Now what, Kevin?"

"I have an idea," he said.

Tara froze, craned her head and squinted up at him. He looked, if possible, more scraggly than usual. A little pale. Twitchy, nervous as if he expected a shadow to jump out at him at any moment.

"An idea," she repeated. "For what?"

"Making money."

She blinked, and glanced out over the balcony quickly, just to be sure. Okay, no flying pigs in the morning traffic. Good. The sky was in roughly the correct place. Good. Nobody was running around screaming about the end of the world. All good.

"Uhmm…" Tara deferred, slightly stunned for a moment. "Okay. Shoot."

"You remember those guys I told you I owed money? Well—" he forged on before she could even reply "—they apparently, uh, heard about you, somehow—" _been telling stories, have you, Kevin?_ "—and they sort of came to me with an, uh, offer."

_Oh, it's not his idea. _The universe promptly righted itself.

"Yes…?" she ventured cautiously. She did not like the sound of this.

He shrunk a little and twisted his hands in a knot. His voice became tiny. "It's, um… a smuggling run. They need a credible pilot and with you being a Citizen, you know…"

Her hand twitched. It was, on reflection, too bad that the law didn't allow you to strangle errant family members.

"A _smuggling run_, Kevin?!" she hissed under her breath so mother didn't hear inside. "Are you _insane?!_"

"It pays well!" he insisted. "I swear. It'll clear my debt, float us for years."

_Years._

Tara sat back, and closed her mouth again. "Just… what kind of smuggling run _is_ this?"

_And where do I report it?_

He shrugged. "I dunno. I got the impression it was some hazmat stuff. Or maybe drugs. They give you a ship. You pick the stuff up from MacArthur, ship it to… somewhere else."

Tara closed her eyes and breathed deeply. _One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten._

"Let me get this straight…" she began. "I just got dishonorably discharged from the UEEN. I am hanging onto my Citizenship by the barest of flimsy threads. Because of the money _you_ blew on your stupid druggie problems mom has about what, two months to live in without treatment? And _you_, to _fix_ _your own_ _mess_, wants _me_ to fly a fucking load of illegal goods out from under the nose hairs of the Navy _I just got kicked out of!?_"

Kevin winced at her words, but apparently bore them. "Well…" he admitted. "Yeah… that's kind of it."

"No," she said flatly. "I refuse."

"Tara," he said. "You don't know these people."

"No, and I don't want to. Deal with your own goddamn problems for once."

"Sis, I mean… they… they know about Alexis."

_One-two-three-four-five—oh, who am I kidding…?_

Tara pinched her nose. "You are not serious. Oh, please, tell me you are not serious. _I do not believe this._" She sighed and sat back. "You're being blackmailed on Alexis' life."

Mutely, he nodded.

_Not mom's life, of course,_ Tara thought acerbically._ They'd know that if they knew about me. Mom is practically dead already anyway._

"Have you considered going to the police?" she asked. "It's the kind of _thing they do_."

He shook his head. "I'm not gonna sic the cops on an _interstellar cartel_, Tara. I'd be dead in a day. Or you would be. Or _Alexis_."

_Oh, a _cartel_. Just brilliant. Wonderful. Fantastic._

"The Advocacy," Tara said, trying another angle. "What about the Advocacy?"

"Same thing."

She shot him an exasperated look. "There is such a thing as witness protection."

Kevin sighed. "And what about mom, then? You think witness protection will pay for her? Not for small low-level fish like the ones I know."

"Right," Tara muttered, conceding that point.

Was there really anything to think over? It sounded like Kevin's greatest and probably only competence, namely gross incompetence, was rearing its ugly head yet again. You had to give him, it was rare to see people who could so reliably and thoroughly screw up.

"Well," she said finally. "It seems like you've covered every possible angle, doesn't it?"

She stood up. "Make the call. Set up a meeting or whatever they do. I'm gonna go get a drink."

"You mean you're going to do it?" Kevin shot her a slightly confused look, as if he honestly hadn't been expecting that. "But…"

She left without another word, slamming the door to the balcony.

_But what, little brother? You expected me to magic yet another solution to our problems out of my ass? Sorry, but I'm out of magic pixie dust today._

This latest of family disasters was promising to be the worst of all. And she, gods help her, was going to have to try and fix it.

* * *

The meeting, when it happened, went down in broad daylight in the local mall, just around the corner of the Kel-To Constore. Kevin, in one of his odd displays of low chivalry, bought them both the signature Kel-To Hydro-Froz fizzy drinks.

They sat down at an outside table in the agreed-upon café and sipped slowly. Tara mercilessly stared down the waiter's vapid protests about bringing in drinks from elsewhere.

She had expected a meeting like this to take place in gloomy back alleys at night or deserted, drafty warehouses with defective lighting. She'd mentally steeled herself for the alleys and the warehouses. Now she felt way off-balance. This… mundanely _regular_ way of doing it was all very unexpected, and not at all as dramatic as she'd been led to believe.

_I've been lied to._

She supposed the holovids didn't _actually_ portray the criminal world as it really was. She squirmed a bit, sipped her chilled drink, and tried not to be too obvious about glancing around for the people they were supposed to meet.

At least they didn't have to wait long. This time, Tara was only half disappointed. Two men sat down at their table.

One looked like a regular stodgy family dad; a light coat over a rather heavy corpus and the beginnings of a double chin only lightly stubbled over.

The other looked faintly business-like, wearing a very non-descript but neat suit over what looked like a powerful build. He was perfectly shaven and had a certain sharpness to his gaze. Of the two, Tara marked him as the probable leader, and, if there was to be any danger, the indisputable future source of it.

He glanced around the small café and muttered something that sounded like 'how quaint', and set a suitcase down by his side. His movements were sure and fluid. He didn't strike Tara as the archetypal low-level 'cartel meat' they'd been expecting either.

Kevin confirmed her suspicions by looking weirdly at the man in the suit and asking of the other, "Hey David, where did Tio go?"

"Elsewhere," the fattish man, apparently David, said gruffly.

"Tio has other business," the man in the suit put in smoothly, in a pleasant tone of voice. David sank back as he continued. "I'll be taking care of things in his stead now. Please, call me Lucien."

A waiter appeared, having spotted the newcomers. Lucien looked up at him and smiled lightly. "Ah, yes, what do they serve in a place like this? Do you have Irish?"

"Irish Coffee?" the waiter replied. "Sure."

The corner of Lucien's lip twitched - with amusement or indignation, Tara was not sure. "Really now? A cup of that, then."

He looked aside. "And you, David? What can I get for you? My treat."

David shifted nervously, shook his head and grumbled something in the negative.

"A shame," Lucien said, and glanced back to the waiter. "That would be all."

The waiter promptly decamped, and returned two minutes later with the order. Lucien accepted the cup, sipped, and grimaced. "Ugh!" he remarked cheerfully and shook his head at the waiter's retreating back. "No tip there, I fear."

Tara finally placed the accent. "You're from Earth."

Charles DeLaney from her wing had been from New York. _Are you back there on medical leave now, Del, after I got your leg blown off?_

Lucien held up both hands. "Guilty as charged." His eyes gleamed with faint amusement. "How perceptive of you."

When Tara said nothing, he put down his hands flat on the table, tapped his index fingers briefly, and went on. "We all know why we are here, of course." He nodded at Tara. "This beautiful and undoubtedly talented young lady has deigned to look favorably on mine and my associates' business proposition."

Tara choked on her Hydro-Froz. _That… is certainly one way to describe it_._ If you're insane._

Lucien tilted his head slightly in concern. "Are you quite alright?"

Kevin patted her uselessly on the back. "Yeah," she managed to wheeze. She cleared her throat, and checked that there was nobody else within earshot of their table. "Perfectly fine. Just tell me what the cargo is. I need to know first, or there can't be a deal."

Lucien smiled in a faintly lupine way, and Tara felt her hair stand up. She consciously kept herself from swallowing. There was more warmth in liquid nitrogen than there was in that smile. This man was _dangerous_.

Did interstellar cartels have executives? And if so, was this what they were like?

_Please, Kevin_, she begged silently. _Don't say anything stupid._

"Ahh, a straight to business type," Lucien purred. "Tut tut, I adore that. Very well. The cargo consists of biological samples of great interest to me and mine."

Tara licked dry lips. "What kinds of biological samples?"

"I'm afraid their exact nature is not mine to tell," Lucien demurred. "But we do anticipate that they will prove to be of great value in our future dealings." He tilted his head faintly at her. "Does that answer satisfy you?"

_No._ "Sure."

"Wonderful." He tapped the suitcase by his side. "In here you will find a suitable amount of cash to lease a Constellation in your own name. On Wednesday, January 2nd, you will land at a specific location just outside Quasi to pick up some initial cargo." Again, he patted the suitcase. "The coordinates are in here."

_A fairly large cargo, then_, Tara thought grimly. The Constellation was one of the larger ships technically crewable by one person out there, and a newer model. At least it'd be comfortable. She'd seen one, once. Well, impounded one, on her first rookie cruise. The captain had been a smuggler and they'd caught him red-handed. Not a good precedent, now she thought about it.

Lucien sipped his Irish Coffee and grimaced again, before continuing.

"Thus, you have four days until then to get your affairs in order. After the stop in Quasi, it's on to the MacArthur orbitals to pick up the cargo, and then towards a dead drop in Drengin; some colony system on the outskirts of nowhere."

Tara was having a very, very bad feeling about all this. She sighed wearily. No choice. "Okay. What initial cargo?"

Lucien smirked. "That would be me. I shall be accompanying you on this trip to, ahh, _assist_."

Tara felt her skin turn slightly clammy at the thought of weeks on end cooped up in the same ship as this man, even one as big as a Constellation. And what, pray tell, did he expect himself and this… apparently 'beautiful young lady' to spend the time with on board?

She firmly quenched that disgusting thought. She didn't do _cowardice_. If she could survive a bombing run without covering fire on a Vanduul carrier fleet, she could damn well survive _this_. The trick, she'd learned, wasn't not to be scared, which was flatly impossible, but to bring the brown pants and ignore the terrified voice screaming sanity in your ear. If he tried anything, she'd just have to… deal with it. Preferably with suitable amounts of violence.

She wet her lips, about to answer, when—

"If you're coming with the ship, why not just fly it yourself and save Tara the trouble?" Kevin asked in an indignant tone of voice.

Tara silently swore to herself. _Of all the people to be cursed with, why, oh, why, was I given Kevin…?_

Lucien regarded Kevin with faint surprise, as if he only now noticed his existence as anything but bland wallpaper. He frowned faintly, as if he considered Kevin to be merely some unnecessarily distasteful appendage of Tara's.

But he didn't do anything. He just stared at Kevin for that brief moment, head slightly atilt in cool inquiry, during which time Kevin paled and shrunk down in his chair, murmuring some unheard apology.

Lucien ran his hands down his suit, straightening it out, and put them back flat on the table. "My piloting skills, alas, are lacking in nature," he told Kevin affably, though his tone indicated that he simply considered such things as being beneath him.

Tara breathed faint relief.

"And your sister's name on the lease registry will be useful given her former military pedigree," Lucien continued, "even though it saw such an…" he smiled briefly "…unfortunate end. And Citizenship opens so many doors otherwise closed. A set of advantages which, sadly, I lack."

_So he's not a Citizen_, Tara thought, surprised. _I wouldn't have guessed that._

"And yet you're still coming?" she asked.

"I do feel the need to ride herd on you," he replied easily. "And make sure nothing… untoward happens en route."

_I bet._ Tara suppressed a shiver. "And what will you be doing in Quasi these next four days?"

Lucien smirked. "Sightseeing. I hear it's the most terrific tourist destination."

He stood up, and David promptly followed suit. Tara blinked. She had almost forgotten the presence of the other man.

Lucien waved a finger at her. "Do remember, my dear, that from the moment I leave and make my calls, we are on a schedule. Delays will be completely unacceptable. And I shouldn't need to remind you of the distasteful consequences of failure, now do I? No? Well then."

He patted his suit. "I do believe this concludes our present encounter." He turned around and looked back over his shoulder. "I shall see you in four days. A pleasant day to you, Miss Watanabe."

They left behind the suitcase, the nearly untouched coffee, and the bill.

_My, how gentlemanly of you, Lucien._

Tara stared after them, still trying to absorb the conversation. Had she misstepped anywhere, done anything wrong? She sat back and crossed her arms, ignoring the melted remains of her Hydro-Froz while she thought furiously.

This didn't feel like 'just' a regular smuggling run. And not because it wasn't like in the holovids, but because this part was _exactly_ like in the holovids. Something was _off_.

_Shit_. Her skin crawled and she felt almost physically sick. This was just getting worse and worse. She could feel a headache coming, and had to quench the impulse to order a drink. She didn't drink. That was Kevin's thing.

_Hi, mom!_ she thought flippantly. _I'm a hardcore criminal now, apparently! I sure hope you appreciate this…_

Still… there were no sirens or flashing lights, and nobody seemed to be trying to arrest her yet. Perhaps she would get out of this alive, somehow. And even more miraculously, with the cash at the end of it. One could hope.

"That man… wasn't low-level, I think," Kevin muttered from her side.

"No…" Tara shook her head slowly. "I don't think he was either."

"So who was he, d'you think?" Kevin asked.

Tara stared at the back of Lucien as he disappeared around a corner.

"Bad news."

_And trouble… big trouble._

* * *

**CHAPTER END**

* * *

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	2. Game Theory

**Chapter Two - Game Theory**

* * *

"Auntie Tara!"

Tara went through it all again in her mind.

_There's no guarantee I'll get cash instead of a bullet by the end of this. Then again, there's no guarantee witness protection will help either, or that they'd even be willing to try. But it definitely won't pay for mom. Where the hell else are we going to get money…? And just _calling_ the police is risky. I have no idea if I'm being monitored or not, or how to avoid that kind of thing._

_Damn it… I'm a fighter pilot, not a secret agent._

"Auntie Tara!"

_If I report this in, I'm almost sure to paint a target on everybody in this family; they've already proved themselves willing to threaten children. It's just a matter of principle to them. They need to make others respect them, so they'll enact retribution even at their own detriment. Or in their case, that's what I'd do. Isn't it? Street cred or something, right? Or just pride…_

She sighed. _Four days is far too little time to decide on this kind of thing_.

Someone pulled at her arm. "_Auntie Tara!_"

Tara blinked, pulled out of her reverie, and looked at the offender. It was Alexis. She'd obviously managed to track Tara down. Not that it was that hard, probably; this small and cramped balcony had quickly become her favorite hiding spot. It was good for reflection when the door to the inside was closed, allowing one to look out over the city in relative peace and quiet. As a bonus, it had glass panes that could be opened to let the outside air in, or closed to keep out the noise. Right now they were closed.

"Sorry, what?" Tara asked. "I was… distracted."

"I know!" Alexis giggled. "I've been trying to get your attention for a minute now! I started by knocking on the door and waving."

Tara took a deep breath and sat back, pushing away all other concerns for now. She put on her best relaxed smile.

"All right, what's up?"

"Dad bought fireworks for tomorrow, but he says I can't fire any!" Alexis said indignantly. "He's so _overprotective_."

_Tomorrow…?_ Tara thought._ Oh, new years eve. Right._ Tara had forgotten. Some traditions never died. Tara mostly thought that this ancient one from old Earth held out simply because people would never let an excuse to legally blow things up slip away if they could help it.

"Oh, _no_," Tara said, managing to gasp. "How _terrible_ of him."

"I know!" Alexis said. "Please, please tell him I can fire a rocket! _Just one!_"

Tara grinned. "Ah! But there are so many safety guidelines on those things, you know… I'd barely even trust myself with one! Nothing like the missiles on the Hornet. You just lock on, click a button and zip! Off it goes." Which was technically a gross oversimplification, but that wasn't really important right now.

"Auntie…!" Alexis whined, for once not letting herself be distracted by military speak.

Tara relented a bit. "Well, _if_ you want me to help…"

Alexis brightened up right on cue, putting on her best sunny _I will do anything!_ smile.

Defenses crumbling in the face of such overwhelming firepower, Tara continued quickly before all resistance vanished, "You have to promise to be good and brush your teeth and go to bed on time and do your homework."

Alexis scowled. "_I_ make _dad_ do all those things!"

…_Right._

Her cunning and redundant plot foiled, Tara prudently decided that a tactical retreat was in order. "I'll talk to him," she promised.

"_Yes!_" Alexis jumped into Tara and hugged her. "Thank you thank you thank you!"

Tara allowed herself a few brief, wonderful moments to simply hug her niece back, and then murmured into Alexis' ear, "Maybe I'll get him to let you fire off a single whistler."

Alexis pulled away, frowning at Tara until she couldn't keep it in any more and began chuckling. _Too easy_.

Her poor niece stepped back and stamped the ground with one foot. "That's not _funny!_"

"_I_ think it's funny," Tara protested, still chuckling. She waved a hand at the door inside. "Go on, you. I'll make it happen."

Alexis grinned, nodded thanks and beat a prompt retreat inside. Tara stared after her as she left. Her com rang. She ignored it.

_Whoever would threaten a child deserves to die_, she thought. _Pure and simple_.

It really was that simple. Reporting those bastards was the only right thing to do, money or no. Let the cops swoop in on Lucien when he expected a pickup. Tip off the navy about the illicit cargo in MacArthur orbit, whatever it was. See them all to jail and, hopefully, sentenced to life or at least a few decades on a prison planet somewhere. David and Tio and Lucien and whoever Lucien's damned 'associates' were. Every one of them. It was the _right_ thing to do.

Still, the com chimed.

Except… was it? When justice came at the price of a loved one's life, what _then_ was the right thing to do? Tara _knew_ the answer intellectually, knew the cold, unfeeling math, knew that her mother's degenerative nerve condition meant she would very likely die much earlier than the average person, knew that Lucien and his ilk were in all probability responsible for the occasional deaths of people with far longer left to live… but she didn't _feel_ it.

She wanted to save her mom. Her silly, stupid, scatterbrained mom was one of the only things she had left.

_Is that so terrible of me?_ she asked in the quiet of her mind. There was no answer, of course.

The com continued chiming, insistent.

"Fine, fine…" she grumbled and picked it up. "Yes?"

It was a male voice. "Am I talking to a Miss Tara Watanabe?"

"You are."

"This is Ismail O'Cleary with Covalex Shipping, LLC."

_You have got to be kidding me._

"I understand you applied for a position as convoy escort on the Lotus run a week ago and we had to turn you away," Ismail continued. "I'm calling to see if you are interested in another position which has since opened up?"

"I…" Tara swallowed surprise. "I… may be?" Damnit, _was_ she? "Tell me more."

"There's been a market change in one of the outermost colony sectors and management wants to capitalize on it," Ismail explained. "We're setting up a new regular run and we need someone to fly escort."

"Which colony sector?" Tara asked.

"I can't say that before you sign the contract's confidentiality agreements, I'm afraid," he said. "Business, you know."

_Of course, I see. _"And you've had problems finding escorts?" Tara inquired dryly. "Since you're calling me."

Ismail's voice became dry in turn. "I believe you've caught on to the essentials, Miss Watanabe."

_Nobody else wants the job._ It made sense. Many of the outer territories were extremely unsafe, and only haphazardly patrolled by the navy, if at all. The anticipated profits would be high, if an established shipping giant like Covalex was willing to brave the pirates that made their living in those areas, and pay for the necessary escorts.

"Let me think for a second," she told Ismail, and sat back in her chair.

She bit her lip. She should do it. She should really, really do it. Flying escorts, even dangerous escorts out in the middle of nowhere, was the preferable option. It _should_ be the preferable option, anyway.

Should she? Just… take the job and turn in Lucien…? Get her family into witness protection, funnel money back to them somehow? Without being caught? Without her payments being traced from her back to her family? With her just flying around out in the open in pirate territory, easy prey for an illegitimate bounty? The complications just kept stacking up.

And…

Reporting Lucien meant giving away all responsibility over her family and trusting in the authorities. She would have to rely on someone else to get the job done. Someone who didn't _care_ about her family except in that abstract _I'm supposed to because it's my job_ way. They didn't _really_ care, they had no _investment_, nothing to _lose_. And how could she know they'd be effective? Criminals like Lucien evaded authorities every day. There was no guarantee that the entire cartel would come crashing down. In fact, just the thought was ridiculous. The only way to be sure something was done right was to do it yourself.

So in the end, it all boiled down to one question… who did she trust most to handle things? Herself… or the authorities?

Without her noticing, her fist clenched tight—

—_you do not, repeat, do _not_ have permission to pursue target_—

"Miss Watanabe?" Ismail's voice came.

—_the prisoner will face the court_—

"Are you still there, Miss Watanabe?"

—_shall be stripped of her Navy pension and savings, as well as all rank, rights, privileges and prerogatives—_

_You know_, the part of her mind that she normally liked to call the sane one informed her, _there are a lot of different authorities and they're probably not all the same, putting them in one group is_—

_Shut up_, Tara thought._ Just… shut up._

"Miss Watanabe?" Ismail asked again.

"Yes, I'm sorry," she said. "I'm here."

"And are you interested?"

She took a deep breath. "I'm terribly sorry, Mr. O'Cleary… but I'm afraid that I'm going to have to reject your offer."

There was a pause. "I see," he said. "That's a shame."

"That it is," she said. "Now, I really have to go. Goodbye." She didn't even give him a chance to respond before she closed the call.

She sat, quietly for a few moments, frowning, before typing in a number and praying a certain someone was on-planet.

He was.

"Hi, David? It's Tara. Remember me? Yeah. Listen, I… I need a favor."

* * *

It was new years eve. Tara, Kevin, Alexis and mother sat inside and dined. It was a rather simplistic meal for the occasion, but it did the job. Outside, there was a constant background murmur of whizzes and bangs, as people celebrated the changing of the year with fireworks ranging from the simple to the technologically arcane and elaborate.

Soon. The day after tomorrow was the day where she would leave. She'd leased a Constellation freighter - affectionately known to the class' aficionados (that was, not Tara) as a _Connie_ - the day before and visited it earlier today in dock to check that everything was in order. It was named the _Lilyhammer_. She'd decided that she liked the name. She'd only done a cursory check compared to the one she planned to do tomorrow, but the ship seemed to be in fine, if slightly used, condition. Seeing the actual ship she would make the run in had brought a nervous reaction from her, making her hair stand on end. She was really going to do it. She was.

It terrified her. She would definitely have to bring the brown pants.

They'd gone out earlier and fired the rockets Kevin had acquired for the occasion, just after the sun went down. Tara's auntly intervention meant that Alexis had gotten to personally fire the two largest rockets, and helped set up the remaining five. You could still sense a residue of excitement hanging over her at the dinner table. She'd poke and prod absentmindedly at her food, and make the occasional surreptitious _whish…!_ sound, as if fondly mimicking the memories already.

After dinner, when things had quietened down, her mother found her brooding on the balcony. "Kevin is putting the kid to sleep," her mother said dryly. "_After_ they've seen the midnight fireworks over the mall out of the bedroom window, of _course_."

Tara was surprised to see her mother navigate her wheelchair through the door with surprising alacrity on the controls. Perhaps that was where Tara had gotten her piloting aptitude. _Naval wheelchair pilot. Beware!_ The thought brought a strangled snort of laughter.

"Yes, yes," her mother said, cheeks dimpling, as she maneuvered to a halt next to Tara's chair. "I know I look silly. But just you wait! One day I'll show you _real_ elegance, girl… one day! Like in old times."

Well, you certainly couldn't call mother a pessimist.

Tara nodded with a lump in her throat. "One day," she agreed.

She found herself thinking back, to miraculously surviving that hover car crash with nothing but a broken arm, a few bent ribs and a hell of a lot of scrapes and bruises. Panicking, trying to figure out what to do. Pulling mother and Kevin out of the burning wreck. Not quite fast enough, that. The blood and the burning rubber and leather and plastic had mixed together into a unique smell she'd never quite managed to forget. _Oh, and the flesh too, of course, let's not forget that. At least they told me he wouldn't have been conscious by then. Probably true; I heard no screaming. Father always did love barbecue._

In some ways, mother was right. You _had_ to look on the bright side of things, or you'd go insane. There were silver linings all over the place, when you just took the care to look. Tara tried to do her best. Things could sometimes be bad, but they were never as bad as they could _possibly_ get, and you should be grateful for the little things. Somewhere out there, someone was having a _worse_ day than she was.

She felt bad for that person.

"Tara, dear, you look so frightfully _lost_ when your gaze goes vacant like that," her mother said, smiling worriedly at her. "It looks so very unlike you. You're usually so firm and present. Are you still in there with us? Is everything all right?"

_That's a _stupid_ question—no… you don't know everything. Or anything. That's right._

Tara sighed. "I feel… old," she admitted. _And worn._ "Is that weird?"

Her mother sighed in turn. "Darling, inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened. It has to happen sometime."

Tara blinked. She hadn't ever expected to hear something… _deep_ like that from out of her mother. But then… her mother, always coming across as slightly vacant-headed and overtly cheerful, was probably a very different person on the inside, beneath all that pretense of okay-ness. How could she not be, after what had happened to her? All Tara had to go on were distant memories from before the accident that seemed all too unreal, glimpses of another person in another life that had belonged to someone else. Not this crippled woman in a wheelchair beside her.

_Still…_

Tara frowned slightly. "No. I know _exactly_ what happened."

Eighteen years old. That was when she'd last felt young.

Her mother's eyebrows went slightly up. "Oh?"

Father dead, mother crippled and in hospital, a thirteen year old brother who did little but cry all the time. Realizing that there was nobody else to take responsibility, no one at all but her to pull them out of that mess. Finding out that they were inevitably going to go broke. Stealing her mother's ID cards and passwords, spending days in exile in her room on the console despite her only half-healed broken arm, poring over the family's accounts, figuring out how to make everything last as long as possible. It had been a very brutal crash course in finance and accounting.

_Among other things._

They'd been fairly wealthy before the accident, but money disappeared quickly when there was hardly any income to replace expenditure. It had been difficult, stretching it a year, two years, three… enough for her to finish academy on a sped-up overworked curriculum and enlist as a naval officer, the surest source of income she had been able to think of that was large enough. All she had to do was do it all _well_, and there was hope. All she had to do was to stay in the job until another solution could be found, to keep earning money—

She supposed, in the end, that she had ultimately failed in that task. But it wasn't over yet. It never was, until you gave up. There was only the fight. New problems were always thrown in your way by catastrophes and training instructors and criminals and stupid wing mates and Kevin. And they all had to be solved, whether tiny or huge. All you could do was to _deal with it_. It was no use whining.

Tara smiled tightly and looked over at her mother with a faintly fond gaze, aware that the silence was stretching.

"What happened," she finally said, "was that I grew up." _Quickly_.

"And how well you've done it, too," her mother commented in an unusually quiet tone of voice. "I've never said this and maybe I should have, but I know how hard it was on you, back then. I was so proud of how my little girl stood up." Her right hand snuck out and grasped Tara's firmly. "I still am."

Tara tried not to feel uncomfortable, but failed. She would not cry (crying and complaining was for weak people), and she didn't know what to say, so she did nothing.

She had buried herself in work and responsibility and kept herself too busy to brood, and Kevin had turned to drugs and alcohol to forget. Both were ways of coping, she supposed.

_I'm sorry I never had time for you, Kev. I always was too busy. Making sure there'd be food on the table the next day. Making sure we had cash for mom. Hacking down on you whenever you spent a single credit over budget. Would you have turned out differently, if I'd been a better big sister…?_

Well, she'd never know; that much was for certain. It was no use wondering. A lengthy silence passed.

"I'm leaving the day after tomorrow," Tara muttered after a while. "Another job, way out by the colonies. I'll be back in a few weeks. A month, at most."

Another silence passed, as her mother absorbed this. Finally, her mother sighed. "I suppose it was too much to hope that I would get to keep you around for longer this time. That dreadful navy never gave you enough leave either." She chuckled dryly. "I should have expected you to continue the trend all by yourself, being the chronic workaholic that you are."

Tara shrugged uncomfortably, again saying nothing.

"I'll miss you," her mother continued. "But I'll see you again in a month at least, so there's that."

Tara nodded silently. Outside, there was a sudden surge in the amount of fireworks going off. She looked at the time. Just past midnight.

"Happy new year," her mother muttered quietly.

Tara sighed. "Happy new year."

* * *

She had said her goodbyes to mother and Alexis.

Kevin insisted on following her to the ship to see her off, in another one of his weird displays of chivalry. Perhaps, having dragged her into this, he had some odd sense of responsibility towards at least making sure she got started all right. It wouldn't have been the weirdest thing she'd experienced this week. Only close. At least he'd also volunteered to carry the crate of supplies she was bringing. The crate was code-locked. That was slightly expensive, but she figured it was worth it to keep her stuff from Lucien's grasp.

Food, clothes, an eight-inch mono-atomic diamond-edged knife, an advanced generalist multi-tool very useful for ship's maintenance, and a small kinetic-projectile handgun she'd managed to scrounge up in a sleazy but cheap gun store. The knife and multi-tool had been birthday gifts collectively from her wing mates to her. The knife supposedly so she could _actually_ cut the dicks off of people who came on to her instead of just threatening to do it (a long story, that - she hadn't been… _quite_ that aggressive) and the other because of her eccentrically paranoid maintenance habits.

It wasn't much, for such a long trip, but it would have to do.

They were in the spacious cockpit, Kevin standing behind her and off to one side, looking boggled at all the blinking lights and controls, and Tara sitting in the main command chair, doing her in-depth start-up checks, slowly booting systems one by one, running tests and keeping an eye on readouts while everything got running properly.

Most pilots just went for a hot start, trusting that the built-in monitors would alert them to any problems. Tara didn't if she could help it. Just like yesterday, there was a very faint wobble in the fusion drive core which was well inside the safe limits and wouldn't have been reported, and the power put into opening and closing the cargo bay doors was a bit above spec. Probably a bad calibration by an engineer somewhere.

All in all, nothing to be worried about, though she'd have to go check those cargo doors out later once she was en route and lower the input wattage if necessary.

"It's gonna be good at least, right?" Kevin commented from behind, watching her work. "Being back in the seat, getting out there in the black, stretching your vac-legs, you know… all that pilot spacer stuff."

"I used to fly an F7A Hornet," she said. "It's like a space sports-hover with big, nasty teeth and a bad attitude. This is like flying a pile of jiggly bricks compared to that. Don't get me wrong, it's a fine pile of jiggly bricks. I'm just not used to lugging all this weight around." She smirked. "I guess some of the… _fancier_ maneuvers are off limits."

_Yeah_, she thought. _Definitely no Crazy Ivans in this thing._

"Well, yes," Kevin allowed. "But you know what I mean. In all the holovids pilots are always all about getting back into space whenever they're not there."

_Well, yes, but we've since discovered that holovids lie._

"_I_ hate vacuum," Tara said morosely while keeping a close eye on a secondary readout from the drive core. "Nothing but emptiness within millions of kilometers in every direction… a gruesome fate waiting out there, right behind a transparent thing as thin as this?" She pointed over at the window of the cockpit and shook her head. "Nope. Scares me to death."

"Isn't that _bad_, for a pilot?" Kevin inquired doubtfully. He'd never heard this from her before.

Tara shrugged. "It can be an advantage, occasionally."

To hear her wing's main engineer Bellatrix 'Trixie' Polotskij tell it, Tara's paranoid distrust of any vehicle she set her feet in only added to her pedigree as a pilot. With the rest of the wing, Trixie always did regular daily checks even if that wasn't in the regs. After two months, she'd given up on finding anything wrong with Tara's Hornet and stuck with the two mandatory weekly once-overs, realizing that she'd encountered a perfectionist who surpassed her in dedication in at least that one area.

When the others joked about it, all Tara had ever said was that _they_ could go ahead and crash in a hover car, and then see how they felt about sitting in what amounted to a vacuum-worthy tin-can loaded to the brim with high-grade explosives. Pointing out that the navy's premier carrier-based fighter was not a hover car… did not help.

"So why _do_ you fly?" Kevin asked.

Tara shrugged. "It paid well. Sometimes, you gotta do what you gotta do." Then she smirked. "And it _is_ fun. Occasionally." She shot one last glance at the status screens, then turned her chair around and stood up. "I'm really done here, you know. Time to lift off, or I'll miss the pickup in Quasi."

That wasn't true, strictly; she was at least two hours ahead of schedule. But there was no point in drawing things out.

Kevin hesitated. "I could come with you, you know," he said quietly. "Help out. Somehow."

Tara blinked, then smiled faintly and shook her head. Why… wasn't she more surprised? Kevin… tried, at least, sometimes. That was one thing you did have to give him. Still…

"No," she said. "You really couldn't."

Kevin's shoulders sagged. Tara frowned, feeling a little bad despite how true it was. An impulse struck her.

"Who'd take care of Alexis and mom meanwhile, huh?" she added, and then surprised herself by walking over and hugging him gently, murmuring, "Just do that, okay? And don't you mind me. I'll be back soon. I can take care of myself." She noticed that he didn't smell of alcohol today.

She stepped back. Kevin looked very surprised for a moment. Then he grinned faintly and shrugged, half dejected, half relieved. "Yeah, you're right…" he said. "You can take care of yourself." He nodded. "I'll see you, okay? Don't… don't die or anything. Alexis would be crushed, and she'd figure out it was all my fault somehow. And don't get caught either. That'd be… bad."

Tara smirked. "I'll definitely try not to."

* * *

Tara saw Kevin to the ship's exit lift, made sure he'd cleared the hangar, and then signaled traffic control, lifted off and slowly took the ship out of the hangar. She took it slow in the beginning, being unused to the controls, but she quickly cleared the docking area and had to give over the wheel to local planet-side traffic control computers. As a security measure, it worked. The _Lilyhammer_ settled into a high-altitude east-bound traffic plane and accelerated up to a modest speed of mach two. She felt nothing. Such a slight acceleration was easily countered by the ship's own gravity generators.

A Constellation was a big ship for one person to fly. The bridge had seats for several people, and Tara couldn't hope to control all the ship's systems at once. It was a good thing it was a somewhat-leisurely smuggling run and not, say, a blockade bust. That way, taking it slowly, having just one person to pilot the ship wouldn't be a major issue.

She quickly reached the nearest orbital tunnel over the nearby New Austin spaceport; a twinned vertical funnel of space assigned to respectively exit from and entry intro orbit. Such areas were common safety measures in the more closely trafficked areas of the planet like New Austin, making sure you didn't accelerate through crowded traffic lanes and risking accidental collisions with horizontally traveling craft, or craft going the other way for that matter.

The ship ascended quickly up through the atmosphere and went into a high speed low orbit at a three hundred kilometer altitude, which would take it to Quasi in fifteen minutes. This small orbital jump was widely used for space-faring New Austin-Quasi traffic, and her screens showed a constant stream of ships either keeping her company or zipping the other way past her in a closely parallel orbit.

She and her wing had been waiting above Keene, she recalled, powered down, in a degrading orbit a bit higher and a lot more slow than this, when they'd set up the ambush for Ivan Dascombe, the slaver bastard who'd killed her wing CO Bruce and Lex, the wing's XO. But he'd seen it coming in the end, and he'd have one-upped the entire 211th Squadron if Tara and her wing - which had otherwise been intended to stay strictly on the sidelines as 'backup' - hadn't given chase whatever her orders were when he dropped into atmo after dropping that solid cargo load of high-yield explosives into the main ambush force's faces. To Dascombe's credit, it must have taken balls (and an entirely other level of arrogance and insanity besides) to know that the UEE Navy _and_ Advocacy had set up a joint ambush for you, personally, yet still go in and spring it hoping to come out on top.

Not that it had ended particularly well for him, with his ship crashed and burning, most of his hired goons lugging portable SAMs having been distributed into various steaming gunks of flesh and Tara pressing a gun to his temple. Too bad Lars and Alice, the only two of her wing mates to make it relatively unscathed through the SAM ambush, had had the presence of mind to stop their friend and freshly-minted CO from actually pulling the trigger. Dascombe was going to be executed in any case. Tara felt a vicious satisfaction when she thought of that fact. She hadn't known she was capable of wishing another person dead like that, of enjoying the knowledge that, indeed, he would die, and maybe had already.

It frightened her a bit.

And to think, her wing mates had once ribbed her about her low kill-count versus her count of enemies taken out even in simulations, joking that she was one of those 'space hippies' just because she preferred not murdering people when she could help it. Go figure.

_Not so funny any more, is it?_ she thought quietly. Apparently all it took was a little _push…_

Perhaps she should consider seeing a psychiatrist when she got back, if there was cash to spare for that kind of luxury. Gods knew she had enough mental baggage already. Technically she should have seen one ages ago, she supposed, and Kevin and mother too, but before she joined the military there'd been no money for things like that. Besides it wasn't the kind of thing she'd have thought about when she was eighteen, and after she'd joined… well, it'd been years since the accident, and she'd figured she'd adjusted just fine by then.

Her ship crossed the day-night terminator and soon she was able to make out the shining conglomeration of lights that was Quasi coming over the horizon. It would be just past midnight down there. Half a minute later her ship inched into an orbital exit tunnel above the second-largest city on the planet and then decelerated into a north-bound plane, flying out over the north side of Quasi.

The border between modern cityscape and forested wilderness was fairly abrupt; this southern continent wasn't widely settled, despite cities like Quasi founded near points of interest, where ancient ruins not of human origin had been found. Quasi was settled around the largest of those ruins. Like Lucien had mentioned at their meeting, it was the reason the city was such a popular tourist destination despite the squalid climate. Tara had seen them a few times in her youth, back when her family still had the ability to go on vacation.

After ten minutes of flying north, she was over the far outskirts of Quasi, the lights of the actual city laid behind her. Her ship began to drop in altitude. Soon, her consoles blinked a warning that the traffic control computers were disengaging in five seconds. She took the ship the rest of the way herself, flying a few dozen meters over the treetops. Right at the coordinates Lucien had given her, there was a small clearing in the forest. She gingerly set the ship down and glanced at the time. An hour and a half before schedule.

There appeared to be nothing at all of interest nearby; the closest point of habitation was a small, isolated house about four kilometers away. She powered most of the ship's systems down, keeping only the drive core hot, the passive sensors on and the cockpit internal lights on at a very low, comfy setting. She pulled out a small book reader, crossed her legs and settled snugly into her seat for a wait. There _was_ something to be said for traveling in a ship with this much space. It was far less claustrophobic than a Hornet.

She saw the lights coming from above well in advance, an hour and a half later, notified to look for them by a small pinging sound indicating an incoming unknown vessel. She could see the tiny pinpricks of a descending hover car far above; it'd be here in a minute or two. She got up from her seat, went back to the bunk area where she'd stowed her code-locked crate with supplies, dug up her handgun and shoved it in her jacket's pocket. She purposefully neglected to turn on the ship's outside lighting before she took the lift down to the outside and stepped out to wait in the shadow of one of the ship's landing struts.

Half a minute later, the hover car touched down close besides the ship. Lucien climbed out of the co-drivers seat and closed the door behind him — he had a driver, of _course_ he had a _driver_. He took a deep, enthusiastic inhalation of the crisp night air, his breath clearly visible, and rubbed his hands. He was yet again dressed in a neutral suit, she could see in the faint moonlight. It looked like it would be pretty cold to wear. She was already freezing from standing still out here for a minute. He squinted over in the general direction of the ship's access elevator, before his eyes fastened on Tara in the shadows.

"Have a liking for the dramatic, hm?" he called, sounding amused. "Or just a keening for a little moonlit chit-chat before we take off? I admit, an armed standoff wouldn't quite be to my taste."

Tara blinked, surprised that he could see her in the dark, and even more surprised that he'd noticed the faint bulge in her pocket and ascertained that it was a gun. "Uh…" she stumbled over the words. "Just being cautious."

Lucien looked up, studying the ship in a very blasé manner, seemingly unaffected by the cold and shooting only occasional glances at Tara. "Now, Miss Watanabe — may I call you Tara? — there is proper caution, and then there is excessive paranoia. I fear this is the latter."

"How so?" Tara asked.

Lucien's lips twitched — definitely with amusement now. "Well, for one, if I wanted you out of the way I'd have contrived to get you out of the ship and have you sniped from far away, not landed here _personally_ and presented myself as a lovely little target, now wouldn't I?"

His face turned faintly wolfish and again Tara felt her hairs stand on end. "No," he continued, "I've been looking _forward_ to our little foray together." He tilted his head faintly at her, then shook it with what appeared to be mild regretfulness, and noted, "You're _really_ not used to this business. It's quite cute, you know."

"I'm not _cute_," Tara said indignantly before she even knew it. She blushed. God _damn_ the man for playing with her like this! And god damn her for letting herself be played. As if she was a mouse and he was the cat.

"To each their own," Lucius conceded affably, and stepped towards the lift. He pressed the key and there was a complaining sound and a flashing of red light. He looked to Tara, frowning faintly. "Aahhhmm…?"

She groaned, walked over and reached in to push the key for him. It flashed green and she pulled back hastily before he disappeared up into the belly of the ship. It returned down empty and she followed quickly after. He was in the cockpit, holding something up and studying it.

"You're not keyed in," she told him as she strode over to see what he was looking at.

"So I gathered…" he muttered, not looking at her. "What are you reading?" He held up her book reader and clicked a button. "_Heat Rise _— sounds a little tacky, that — by… oh my. Is that your m—"

Tara snatched it out of his hand. "Give me that."

He smirked and held up both hands. "A little touchy tonight, are we?" He raised an eyebrow with mocking curiosity. "Is your mother by any chance… talented?"

"She's—" Tara began, then hesitated "—_fine._"

"I suppose that answers that," Lucien said dryly.

There was a clunk from underneath. "And that," Lucien continued, "would be my luggage waiting for the lift." Moments later, the hover car touched off, its lights slinking into the night with undue haste. Lucien's crony had no doubt busied himself in order to get away. Tara already envied the man.

This would be a very long journey.

* * *

The planet MacArthur was in the Kilian system, which was only one jump away from Terra; little more than a day's travel. The jump point was a few hours away at 0.2 _c_, the nominal safe cruising speed that was universally adopted. Any faster than that and there started being chances of all but the most hardened particle screening glitching out and letting the occasional stray particles through at full speed, with lethal consequences for ship and crew. Tara thought that sixty thousand miles per second was more than fast enough anyway.

Lucien quickly made his home by the sleeping in the back of the ship, right by the bathroom facilities. His luggage consisted of a fairly large suitcase. Alas, the sleeping area was just that; one area. Four bunk beds outfitted only with half-way decent privacy curtains. Tara would definitely be sleeping fully clothed.

Lucien had taken the upper right bunk, going by the ship's forward orientation. Tara, in response, had moved hers from the upper left to the lower left, making sure she was as far away as possible. He'd seemed greatly amused by this. Tara had rolled her eyes at his smirking comments, suppressed her fight-or-flight instinct and gone back forward to the bridge to coax the ship's auto-pilot and hail ahead to Jump Control in preparation for the jump to the Kilian system in half an hour.

Twenty minutes later saw them in the process of decelerating relative to the Terra-Kilian jump point. They were both on the bridge, Tara in the central command and control chair bent over the coms interface and Lucien lounging in the weapons control chair, occasionally prodding at his screens, albeit with all of the actual weapons control functionality still locked out by Tara, turning it into little more than a regular Glas console.

He was currently studying a tactical overview of the immediately surrounding space, the multitude of other ships on the Terra-Killian approach showing around them as small dots tagged according to their transponders and signatures. A smallish Navy squadron tagged as _SQ312_ was decelerating about a light-minute behind them, consisting of a small carrier escorted by two corvettes and a battle-cruiser. A speckling of other ships dotted the approach to the jump point as well, including a convoy up ahead of huge cargo super-carriers fresh from Kilian and apparently inbound for Terra.

Lucien seemed to so far have tolerated the restrictions she'd input when she keyed him into the ship's systems, though he expressed a slightly offended-yet-bemused tolerance. Apparently the man found almost _everything_ amusing, as if the quaint universe he happened to live in never ceased to delight with all the little surprises it reserved for him personally.

An icon on the com screen started flashing, indicating a new message received. Tara pressed the icon and the bridge's speakers crackled crisply to life.

"_CS Lilyhammer_, this is Terra-Killian Jump Control. Come to Terran AV one-niner-niner by two-one-seven and designate as Q19 on arrival, ETA five-niner-two seconds on transmit. Please acknowledge."

Tara pressed to record and said, "Terra-Killian Jump Control, this is _CS Lilyhammer_. Acknowledge coming to Terran AV and designate as Q19 on arrival-" she glanced at another board "-ETA five-six-eight seconds on transmit."

She pressed to transmit, keyed in a few slight course changes and leaned back in her seat, absentmindedly keeping an eye on the ETA timer. There wasn't much for her to do right now; things like navigating a jump was a computer's job unless you were an insane adrenaline junkie like those wackos who originally traced the hyperspace paths through jumps that the rest of everybody, namely normal and sane people, would so neatly have their navcoms follow. One wrong twitch by a human pilot and you were so much ionized plasma spread across interstellar space somewhere between here and there.

"What in the worlds does all that gibberish mean?" Lucien inquired dryly from his seat on her right after a few moments.

Tara frowned faintly, and then asked, "You're a _smuggler_, even if not the piloting type, and you don't even know how to approach a _jump point?_"

Perhaps this was a first for more than one of them.

Lucien turned in his seat, one of his legs crossed, and shot her a faintly annoyed glance. His eyes gleamed with a faint coldness. He made a mild inquiring gesture with one hand that was completely at odds with the feeling he radiated. "Alas, no. But I have _you_ here to enlighten me as to the peculiar eccentricities of your chosen field, Tara dear."

Tara clenched her jaw ever so slightly, then relaxed herself, her eyes narrowing faintly. What a… mulishly _childish_ response, really. As if she'd challenged his dominance by bringing to light a flaw of his and he'd taken offense, seeking immediately to re-establish himself as the one to be feared, the one here who acted with _real_ agency.

She saw Lucien smirk faintly as he studied her face. The glint in his eyes had shifted, telling her that he knew what she was thinking or at least suspected, and waiting for a response, as if this was a game and it was currently her move. All of this was just a game to him. This conversation, a mere contest. But not a contest between equals, but a contest he engaged in with a lesser, purely for the fun of it.

A few seconds passed before Tara replied with a guarded caution. "It means… that we're gonna follow the AV - approach vector - normally used for in-bound Terran traffic and that when we arrive in about nine minutes, we'll be number nineteen in the queue to make the jump." She eyed her tactical overview. "There's a big convoy making transit, see? That's why it's such a high number. You can only go one at a time, with small breaks in between. For safety reasons."

"I see." Lucien tapped his fingers thoughtfully on the arm of his seat. "Why make such a large deal out of it? It seems simpler to just… _fly_."

"If you want to die, sure." Tara shrugged.

It wouldn't do to emerge out into the back end of the ship ahead of you, after all, in case it hadn't managed to accelerate safely out of the way. The exit coordinates, following the exact route of the exploratory maniac who'd flown it when the jump point was mapped for the first time, were _always_ the exact same for all jumps in a given direction.

Unless there were tractors on standby to quickly pull the ensuing wreckage out of the way of the next emerging ships you could have a catastrophic pile-up in space that just didn't stop until somebody had carried the news through to the other side.

An idea struck her. "You ever play anything of those big space sim games?" she continued. "Star Commander? Winglancer? Uh… Space Citizen? You know, where you fly around in space, trade, shoot pirates and Vanduul and all other sorts of aliens by the dozen, stuff like that?"

Such games were immensely popular. Tara had never understood why, since space was right out there if you were so eager to fly around in it. But apparently some people enjoyed faking it a lot more than they would enjoy the real thing. It seemed a cheap and useless waste of time. Still, several people she knew in the Navy boasted very high scores in the, uh, 'PvP' parts of such games, and it had been a common pastime for some of her wing mates to (illegally) load the Navy's Virtual Reality sim stations with that kind of software and game it out among themselves, or even demolish hapless civilian players.

Of course, if and when the 'civs' actually did win such scenarios which apparently happened on occasion, they had invariably been cheating - according to her wing mates, that was, who'd complain loudly about accelerated reflex drugs, aimbots and 'proper sportsmanship', which was peculiar when you considered the quality of resolution and responsiveness the Navy's VR stations offered over the average civilian models.

Tara really knew a lot more about such games than she cared to. She thought the regular, more realistic naval simulation software was more than adequate.

Lucien hesitated. "I… _may_ have," he said slowly, as if it pained him slightly to admit this. "Once. Briefly. Why?"

Tara kept her face straight. _So not _that_ perfect, huh, Lucien?_

"Well, real life is really _not_ like that," she said. "Real life, you see, unlike a game-" _which you apparently seem to think all this is_ "-has things like Bureaucracy and Procedure—" She felt a sharp twinge inside as she found herself mimicking Bruce's habitual way of verbally capitalizing words in mid-sentence to puncture their overinflated importance. She grimaced faintly, made herself ignore it and continued. "And traffic control in heavily trafficked core systems like Terra and Kilian usually follow the regulations religiously. That way, if things go wrong, nobody can blame _them_."

_Practically every non-corrupt bureaucrat operates like that, really_, she thought drolly._ And the corrupt ones pretend to, for much the same reasons._

"Ah." Lucien turned back to his displays as he absorbed this. "Hm."

A few minutes passed in silence. Tara found herself smirking while she glanced at his back. It was silly and childish of her, but she just couldn't help it. _Did I just get the better of you or didn't I, Lucien? Was that an insult or a lecture or both? Don't get cocky. You're not the only one who can play._

* * *

The jump itself, when it was finally their turn, was blessedly uneventful. When they cleared the aperture into the Kilian system, Tara closed her eyes against the usual nausea she experienced when making a jump transition. Lucien, of _course_ and damn the man, seemed completely unaffected, as most people not unlucky enough to be her just were. Even worse, he was gentlemanly enough to get up and go back to the medical cabinet and retrieve a couple of anti-nausea pills for her while she went through the proper com exchange with Jump Control.

When he came back with a glass of water and the pills, they were already accelerating away from the jump point. Tara accepted the water and pill grudgingly. "Thanks…"

Lucien smiled mildly. "It was no problem."

She tried to reassure herself that he had absolutely no reason to try to kill her yet and that it would be actively detrimental to him to derive himself of his pilot so early in the run. It helped a bit. She swallowed the pills and drank. Within half a minute the nausea had indeed subsided, leaving only a mild headache.

Lucien stood by her side, waiting, eying the course she had plotted to MacArthur. He pointed at it. "Why is it so… wobbly?"

Tara looked at the screen; she'd hardly thought about it, she'd just done it. The planet's orbit was currently on the other side of the system primary, and the Kilian-Terra jump point was pretty far out already. Their plotted course was a little irregular in the name of saving time; it would take them in close to the sun and then in a soft parabola around it, safely skirting beneath the recommended limits for particle density. There were a few course changes plotted in when they were almost at their closest to the sun.

"We're flying on max velocity, right on point two cee," she told him wearily, rubbing her forehead and hoping the headache would go away soon. It was getting worse, though, not better. It worried her slightly; she'd never had such issues before, but now they were regular.

_The stress_, she told herself. _Just the stress._

It was probably even true.

"Yes…?" Lucien said. "And?"

Tara blinked, realizing she'd zoned out. "And… we need to avoid areas with a high particle density when we're going that fast." She pointed on her screen, at two areas near the sun. "Recent solar storm, with ejecta there and there."

Lucien raised his eyebrows. "A solar storm? That sounds… distinctly brutal. What is it exactly?"

For a person with such a suave demeanor, Lucien's first-hand appearance of high education was rather rapidly fraying at the edges upon closer inspection, Tara noted.

"It's a coronal mass ejection," she explained. "Opposite magnetic field lines come together and meld, resulting in a huge outward burst of ejecta—err, matter. Mostly electrons and protons, perhaps a few heavier elements. It's a bit more complex than that but there's the basics of it. You don't want to fly through that at sixty thousand miles a second."

"You seem to know a lot about them," he commented, sounding a little surprised.

"I used to be a naval officer, Lucien," she replied. "We're an educated lot, even the gung-ho fighter pilots. You don't get in without a proper academic grade."

Lucien seemed to bristle a little, to her secret amusement. He hid it well, but now that she was watching for it, it was obvious.

She had, in fact, learned all about solar storms and black holes and supernovas and so forth from soaking in science documentaries late at night when she was a teenager. Old ambitions, that. Before… everything else. She probably shouldn't mention it. It might annoy Lucius even more, and she wasn't in the mood for more of his dominance games. It was early in the morning in her personal timescale too, now. Perhaps that was also a reason for the headache.

She got up, rubbing her forehead again. "I'm going to grab some sleep. We'll be there in thirteen hours. Don't… don't touch anything."

"You locked it up," Lucien pointed out, a little indignant testiness creeping into his voice. "What could I do?"

Tara blinked. "Right."

She turned around and went back through the ship, turned off the lights in the aft half, leaving only a soft glow from the lit bridge down by the bunks. She dropped exhausted into her bunk and pulled the curtains. The numb darkness of sleep came only minutes after.

* * *

She woke up eleven hours later, having accidentally overslept somewhat. She noticed that her alarm had been turned off while she slept. Did Lucien do that just to annoy her? It… seemed a little too banal, for him. He annoyed her in much more complex ways.

Most days she was a morning person. This was not one of those days. She sat down bleary-eyed at the small retractable dinner table set into the wall. Lucien had apparently tracked it down and managed to activate it while she slept. He glanced back from the bridge where he was sitting, noticed she was up and brought her some tea in a thermos cup and something called 'reddi-groats' for breakfast, one of those small quick-meal ensembles that had a tab which you pulled, causing a chemical heat-plate in it to activate and flash-cook the contents. Lucius must have brought them. She'd only brought a few boxes of vacuum-packed food from Torreele Foodstuffs. Cheap, but serviceable.

She wasn't really sure what to think about Lucien bringing her breakfast. Rejecting it seemed a little _too_ rude, even if she wasn't hungry. She settled for eying him suspiciously as he sat down at the table besides her.

"You're not having any?" she asked a little hoarsely.

He shrugged lightly. "I ate breakfast a few hours ago."

"Oh," she said dully, her voice beginning to recover. She tried a bite of the porridge which the groats had turned into. It was surprisingly edible.

"You look like hell," he said. "Didn't sleep well, I take it?"

"Slept fine," she grumbled, and sipped her tea. She blinked and looked appreciatively down at it. "This is good."

"Ancient chinese in origin," Lucien replied. "Grown on S—ah, a space station. The leaves were developed in the 23rd century, I believe, before all those bothersome GM restrictions. They worked in some unique flavors." He shrugged. "I like it."

Tara took another sip. "Huh."

Bruce sat back, watching her eat. She tolerated his gaze with some disquiet, and didn't take long to finish up the porridge. She trashed the used meal box and grabbed her half-finished tea. She was halfway out of her seat when Lucien spoke.

"Who's Bruce?" he asked.

She almost stumbled and ended up spilling burning hot tea all over her hands. "God _damn—!_" she hissed at the pain and dropped the cup on the floor. Then, ignoring the already fading pain, she spun on Lucien, who was watching her coolly, a corner of his lip turned up as if he'd just won some sort of victory.

"Where'd you hear that name?" she demanded.

He waved a hand lightly as if it was of no consequence. "You talk in your sleep. I… got the impression the name was of some relevance. I see I was right. Who was he?"

"None of your damn business, that's who," Tara snarled.

He help up his hands in a conciliatory gesture, bemused. "Oh, my."

She glared at him for a few moments before she simply turned and left, leaving the cup on the floor.

"Bruce Montgomery was your commanding CO," Lucien called from behind.

Tara stopped dead, rooted to the ground.

"He's dead, isn't he?" Lucien continued. "Alexei too. And most of the others. Except those were _your_ fault. Tom. Clarice. Fitzroy. And so on. Only Lars, Charles and Alice left."

Tara turned slowly, very slowly, to face Lucien. Her jaw hurt from clenching tight but she schooled her face to show only passive calmness.

"Oh dear, I hit a nerve there, didn't I?" he inquired lightly. His eyes gleamed with satisfaction. "Oh, those _eyes!_" he positively crooned, grinning. "If looks could kill, I'd be a fine paste on the wall right now! I admire your excellent control."

"_How?_" Tara managed to ground out.

Lucien shrugged casually. "I looked it up after I heard you muttering in your sleep; I have my means. And to think, I had no idea that getting most of your old wing killed was the reason for your discharge." He shook his head and tsk-tsk'ed. "What a dramatic end to such a promising career. Fast promotion track too, I note. But at least you got him; Dascombe, was it? A slaver, too; scum of the galaxy. Very good."

He licked his lips. "Was it worth it, Tara dear? Was it worth paying in all those lives you sacrificed, to see the bastard dead? But you didn't even get to _kill_ him. I can see it in you now, yes, that _hurt_, didn't it? Not exacting your revenge when _you_ paid the price. What a vicious reaction, Tara! And here I didn't think you had it in you."

Tara's hand twitched, in a spastic, clenching kind of way. Lucien looked at it and smirked. "Ah, but the dilemma of violence!"

She felt ready to snap, to give him what he was so obviously asking for. "Give me _one. _Good. Reason."

Lucien raised his eyebrows. "Not to kill me, you mean?" He leaned forward in his chair, steepling his finger and tapping them together, and smiled. "I'll give you two. One: you can't. But most of all, two: you _need_ me. Without me, there's no cargo, no mission. And so, without me, there's no payout. And no mommy, or Kevin, or pretty little darling Alexis."

He leaned back again, and studied her, eyes bright, lips slightly parted, cheeks faintly flushed, as if he was getting high from this. "Ah, but I see in you now the question that begs the answer. Why? Why, oh _why_ do I choose to antagonize you like this? Don't I upset the mission? Why the risk?" He stroked his chin thoughtfully, before shrugging lightly. "I'm bored. I like risks. And you're… _interesting_."

His lip twitched. "I look at you, so… _tense_, like a snake coiled to strike, hidden in there, yet rooted fast by some damn…" he bared his teeth, snarling "…_principles_. Looking down at me like you're _above_ me, somehow better for chaining yourself or knowing some obscure facts when you're perfectly capable of being every bit as ruthless as I am."

He stopped, as if catching himself - took a deep breath, smoothed his features back to pleasantness and made a light inquiring gesture with a hand.

"So, what will it be? Will you snap, try to kill me or turn me in to the authorities? Or will you tolerate me, gnashing your teeth, because you _must_, because the lives of your family _depend_ on it?" He sighed contentedly, his manner completely relaxed again. "I look forward to seeing your answer, Tara dear. But for now, go on your merry way. I can see from here that there is a new com message waiting for you on the bridge." He waved his hand at her in dismissal, got up from the chair and waltzed towards the back of the ship, humming faintly. "And do unclench your fists, dear, you're bleeding," he called back.

Tara stood utterly still for some time - she knew not how long - before she managed to uncoil herself and regain movement. Slowly, she relaxed her bunched fists and looked at them. Her nails, uncut for four days in the general rush of things, had dug into the soft flesh of her hand. Blood ran down her wrists and dripped slowly to the floor, _drip… drip… drip_. She watched for a few moments, mesmerized, then blinked and looked up.

She narrowed her eyes at where Lucien had left; she couldn't see him down there, he must be in the bathroom. She took a deep, shaky breath, and clenched her jaw. He was right. She couldn't touch him.

_Gods, listen to what to he said, how he spoke,_ she thought. _The man's literally insane. A scary, sociopathic voyeur to whom the world is just another play-toy. How do people _become_ like that?_

Meanwhile, acting without thinking, she went over and grabbed a sterilizing tissue out of the wall dispenser by the dining table and wiped her hands clean. She ignored the sharp sting of the disinfectant.

She walked to the bridge. It happened one step at a time, the dull clang of her boots on metal echoing inside her skull as if it was empty. It was strange, like she was watching out from inside of her own head. She felt a little bit dizzy. She sat down in the central chair and, slowly, her head cleared slightly.

_Now what?_ she asked herself.

The answer came all by itself, as instinctive as breathing. _Deal with it. It's what you _do_. Just deal._

She frowned thoughtfully. He'd played her like a fiddle, and she'd _let_ him.

That would not happen again. He'd caught her off-guard now with this sick game of his, and she'd underestimated him. Next time she would be prepared. And there _would_ be a next time, of that much she was sure. That was his game. He'd shown her the rules now. _Let me toy and let me watch and poke and prod to see what breaks, and perhaps I'll let you have this little all-important treat that I hardly care about when we're done._

Idly, she reached out and pressed the button to play the received message on the bridge speakers. There emerged a crisp female voice that could only be described as military.

"Approaching ship, class Constellation, transponder designation _Cargo Ship Lilyhammer_, this is MacArthur orbital control. Be advised, you are entering a military zone. Please state your cargo and intended destination. You have thirty minutes to respond from message receipt."

Tara glanced at the message's time stamp. It had been received almost six minutes ago, and they were still about fifteen light-minutes out from MacArthur and decelerating steadily around the system primary, which meant she had a few minutes yet. They'd probably sent it the moment - about fifteen minutes back - that the ship started its soft curve around the sun, and it became clear that its course could only be MacArthur or the restricted military zones in the outer parts of the system; those were mostly used for training maneuvers and war games away from public eyes. Tara had spent a lot of her trainee time in there.

The message, of course, was perfectly routine. Hundreds of ships arrived at and left MacArthur every hour. You didn't keep the galaxy's largest shipyards private, and the Navy had always acknowledged that it could only have that much security regarding who came and went. The rest of the security was provided by the capital ship fleets and multitudes of stationary point defense installations floating in orbit.

Tara had always thought you had to be insane to try anything stupid in the Kilian system what with such a massive Navy presence close by, and she did not appreciate the irony of her current situation. At least Lucien and his associates had taken the comfortingly sane precaution of making sure that they were also transporting an actual, legit shipment, which would just so happen to include a few extra items not on the manifest…

She shook her head and took a minute to compose herself mentally, then pressed to record and leaned into the mike, speaking in a dull voice.

_I can't believe I'm actually doing this._

"MacArthur orbital control, this is the _CS Lilyhammer_, inbound for MacArthur orbital eight-nine, subsection B and carrying no cargo. We are requesting permission to dock at stated destination in ETA five-niner-niner-…"

* * *

**CHAPTER END**

* * *

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